The menu is not the meal.

Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not mistake realization for liberation.

Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.

The Noble Eightfold Path is not a path of mere intellectual understanding but a path of practice, of inner transformation.

The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

The purpose of studying Buddhism is not to study Buddhism, but to study ourselves.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.

Zen proposes its solution by directly appealing to facts of personal experience and not to book-knowledge.

The true understanding is that the practice itself is enlightenment.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past.

The silence between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.

When you love someone, you have to have trust and confidence. Love without trust is not yet love.

To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.

The most important factor in achieving happiness is the mind. Happiness and suffering are mental states and therefore depend on the mind.

The noting mind and the object noted appear to occur as a pair. Through concentration they are seen to arise and vanish together.

Mindfulness is the key to the present moment. Without it we cannot see the world clearly, and we cannot make the wisest choices in our lives.

The practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with something.

Emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is the space of possibility.

The cave I live in is empty and so is my mind. I live simply and at ease.

The dharma is not about collecting more beliefs but about becoming free from the power of belief itself.

In the moment of pure noting, there is no self - only the knowing and the known.

The path to liberation is through understanding the true nature of mind and matter through direct observation.

The goal of the Buddhist path is not to add something to our existence but to discover something that has been there all along.

Every being has the potential of becoming a Buddha. Our true nature is Buddha nature.

Meditation is not about escaping from difficulty but about meeting it with awareness.

The purpose of our lives is to be happy, and happiness is found in benefiting others.

The greatest achievement is selflessness. The greatest worth is self-mastery.

Don't think that only sitting with the eyes closed is practice. If you do think this way, then quickly change your thinking.

When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions.

The person who clings to nothing of the past, present and future, who has no attachment and no aversion, has no conceptual imprints.

The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities.

The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with.

Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.